To be fair, paladins and shamans are one of the classes that have a ton of buttons. I probably have close to 15-20 keybinds not counting my razer naga keybinds. Compare that to some pure dps classes. On my warlock I have maybe half the keybinds, same with hunter.

I'm not saying paladin needs any spells removed, but Blizzard is probably going to address it.

You're correct, paladins and shamans (somewhat druids) have a lot of abilities in their spellbook, but how many of those are utility/hybrid things left from the old days? Ret has 3-5 buttons we use every minute for our dps rotation, moonkins the same, feral have 6-7 if I count correctly (my alt is druid, former main. I like hybrids) ele has what? 4? Enh idk, prob somewhere around the same as ret does, I count Lightning Bolt + Chain lightning as one, same as TV/DS is one and CS/HotR is combined.
Remove those utility spells? Sure some could, I think they'll end up merging emancipate with cleanse and such.

If they had to take a spell away, I'm glad it's Inq and not something more integral to our utility or damage.

Inq is by far the biggest dps factor (and scaling factor) for ret except actual gear improvement.
They can merge a lot of spells in our utility kit without the need to touch our damage abilities...

Just to add to the "almost all classes have auto refresh on dots..."
Inq was 30-36 sec before, then it got increased to 1min because ppl had problems with it. In a way those 24 extra seconds we got could've been "every 3 holy power you use increases the duration by X seconds"
They could've done that instead, imo Inq was more involved before the duration buff...

I'm not exactly sure what this has to do with Inq for Ret anymore, but no one really has the autorefresh mechanics you're claiming.

Originally Posted by ujx

I posed a question about the following classes/spec: warriors

Fury manages something totally different in terms of resources and CSmash windows, none of which happens anything close to automatically. Performing a correct CSmash requires a) prayer to the proper gods that morning and b) making correct choices that can't be made for you.

warlocks,

Nothing autorefreshes Immolate for Destro. Affliction sacrifices Haunt time or a different Soulburn utility to autoapply dots and even then this is a conscious button choice. Demo has to deliberately swap to Meta to autorefresh Corruption and doing it wrong will waste Demonic Fury at the wrong time; Demo Doom always has to be manually reapplied (topically, every 30-60s).

hunters,

Focus Fire doesn't apply itself, it requires monitoring and awareness of your upcoming plans so you don't FF at the wrong time or stumble a GCD during BW. Black Arrow gets manually reapplied on CD. I don't know what Marks does because I haven't cared about Marks since Cata.

moonkins,

Constantly manually reapply everything because their dot extension mechanic is erratic and unpredictable, and also Eclipse incentivizes you to fire off those keys constantly to capitalize on the damage bonus.

shadow priests,

Manually reapply everything with no autorefresh mechanics.

shamans

Ele manually reapplies Searing Totem and Flame Shock, and also has to spend a modicum of awareness to not f. up and let Flame Shock drop while LB is off-CD because of being over-eager with consuming Fulmination. Enhance manually reapplies both Searing and FS.

and death knights.

Frost manually reapplies PS if Outbreak is down. Unholy can only extend diseases for so long with Fester unless it's Festerblighting and deliberately sacrificing Scourge Strike quantity for cheesing dot snapshots. Unholy & Frost must always manually reapply when changing to a new target if it's outside Pest range. Outbreak and Unholy Blight are still activated abilities you need to track the availability of. Blood is fire/forget due to Scarlet Fever procs making diseases infinite, but Blood is a tank with other crap to worry about.

Divine Prupose in Cataclysm was such a big annoyance because it indeed was a huge difference if it procced or not. Our Holy Power generation was super slow and still maintaining a buff and pressing your finisher took a long build up time. Now all our filler spells generate Holy Power and we get to use our finisher far more often and Inquisition is now doubled in duration. Moreover the damage of our finisher Templar's Verdict was gutted to account for the higher HP generation so that nowadays a comeback of DP as baseline ability to my mind would not still be the annoyance it was in Cataclym but more something that changes your gameplay on the fly and you want to react to in order to take full advantage of it.

Yeh I agree Kyra, I share the fear of Anaxie though, being balanced around RNG is NOT fun. Just look at fire mages and warriors at the start of every expansion, low crit = terrible. Then End tier comes and they fucking blow up with their massive crit chance!

What's wrong with Inquisition? Perhaps it's not insanely exciting, but it provides a way of ramping up damage and a minor skill check. It's barely an inconvenience to keep up now they increased the duration so much.

Hey Bear - in contrast to us Rets those Warriors, Mages and Boomers get easily more often balanced accordingly in the course of the xpac. Do you remeber how often they changed damage scaling of warrior abilities in MoP? How often they changed Mage Bombs and their scaling and even our featherly friends did get enough attention.

This is not saying that we are in a bad spot right now, far from it but I do not see your argument of huge damage swings because every class has this huge damage increase through more gear. Sure some might scale a little bit better within one tier of gear.

Well it's not just the raw numbers (I mean that's real too, don't get me wrong) and more the fact that at low levels of certain secondary stats, some specs (Fury, Fire, Boomkin are good examples) can feel not just weak, but like they're not even finished design-wise.

Actually that's very similar to how Prot & Ret feel at too-low Haste levels: in all cases you're sitting there going "Come on, why does this feel like a car that won't shift gears??"

Every time you press Bloodthirst as Fury and don't Enrage, or shoot off your 5th consecutive not-critting Pyroblast, a tiny sliver of your soul just spontaneously dies. :p

Haha, yeah I know what you mean. It will feel "clunky" (I just had to use this one) again to play with very low haste at the beginning of WoD. Really not looking forward to that aspect. But it is one reason more to have an additional mechanic to fill empty GCDs, at least to my mind.

Like I said Id love to see a `dispatch`type mechanic for us to help fill those empty gcd`s when you tv it has a 30% chance to let you use HoW 1 time , (direct copy from the rogues ability with their finisher and execute switched for ours)

or the version I prefer that will actually make crit useful to us on the level of haste

"When your critically hit with Crusader Strike you gain Clarity for X seconds , enabling one use of Hammer of Wrath regardless of target health "
this will make crit's value sky rocket and make it so we don't need to worry about itemization nearly as much , because you guys know that plate gear will be crit bloated because blizz loves warriors so much

It would also give us our much needed second proc to watch you'd want to use it before your next CS to not waste a potential proc but not before TV@5HP because you'd miss out on the HP the HoW proc would generate .

Let's face it art of war is a boring proc and we don't get excited about it procing "oh yay my exo (this hits like a wet noodle)cd reset !!" boring...

Also most other classes have more than 1 proc to watch IIRC ..why are we dumbed to the point of having one that barely matters to us?

New Ability: Renounce. When cast, Renounce permanently changes the Paladin into a Warrior.